While Southerners and proslavery Northern Democrats blamed the division in the country on antislavery “agitation,” Lincoln blamed slavery itself. “We believe that the spreading out and perpetuity of the institution of slavery impairs the general welfare. We believe—nay, we know, that that is the only thing that has ever threatened the perpetuity of the Union itself. The only thing which has ever menaced the destruction of the government under which we live, is this very thing. To repress this thing, we think is providing for the general welfare. Our friends in Kentucky differ from us. We need not make our argument for them, but we who think it is wrong in all its relations, or in some of them at least, must decide as to our own actions, and our own course, upon our own judgment.”
Lincoln’s Cincinnati speech was widely circulated, printed in the Cincinnati Daily Gazette, reprinted in the National Intelligencer in Washington, and produced as a pamphlet by the Ohio Republican State Central Committee. But it received its greatest circulation through a stealth effort by Douglas, who arranged to have fifty thousand copies published under the title, “Douglas an enemy to the North,” and distributed in the South, cynically using Lincoln to counter Southern hostility against him.
On his way home to Springfield, Lincoln addressed a crowd in Indianapolis. He traveled to Milwaukee on September 30 to speak at the state fair, where he denounced Hammond’s “mud-sill theory” of labor. In notes to himself, he wrote, “Equality, in society, alike beats inequality, whether the lat[t]er be of the British aristocratic sort, or of the domestic slavery sort. . . . Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.” He spoke in Beloit and Janesville. Within two weeks, from mid-September to early October, Lincoln delivered eleven speeches.
Lincoln wrote Chase a letter regretting they had not met when he had been in Ohio. He warned him against any leaning toward Douglas. “It is useless for me to say to you (and yet I cannot refrain from saying it) that you must not let your approaching election in Ohio so result as to give encouragement to Douglasism. That ism is all which now stands in the way of an early and complete success of Republicanism; and nothing would help it or hurt us so much as for Ohio to go over or falter just now.”
On October 13, the Republicans swept Ohio, winning formidable majorities in the legislature and the governorship. They also swept Iowa, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, humiliating Buchanan. “Is not the election news glorious?” exulted Lincoln. “We all think that your visit aided us,” Samuel Galloway wrote him. “You have secured a host of friends among Republicans.” Nominating Chase for president, Galloway wrote, “would sink us. . . . Your visit to Ohio has excited an extensive interest in your favor. Whilst I would desire to have you remain as you are unobtrusive; at the same time, tis my . . . advice that you treat kindly and respectfully all requests for the use of your name.”
William T. Bascom wrote Lincoln, “These are splendid results, and we feel very much satisfied at them. We think they dispose of all the hopes of Douglas in Ohio. Squatter sovereignty is dead here. We feel that some of the credit of this result is due to you, and in behalf of our Republican friends I again return you our most grateful thanks. In the future of the Republican Party in Ohio your visit to the Buckeye State will be held in grateful remembrance.” Lincoln clubs began to appear in Ohio.
The reenactment of the Lincoln-Douglas debates throughout Ohio damaged Douglas and enhanced Lincoln. Douglas’s party went down to defeat, Lincoln’s to victory. Just a year earlier, cannons boomed for Douglas’s reelection and he strode forward as the inevitable candidate. Lincoln, who had slipped into the mud in a seemingly final indignity, now wore the laurels. Pursuing Douglas again served his purposes. Douglas’s flaming ambition revived him.
The day before the Ohio results, on October 12, Lincoln received a telegram from James A. Briggs, the head of the Ohio State agency in New York. Briggs had been a Cleveland attorney, counsel to railroads, newspaper publisher and editor, founder of Cleveland’s public high schools, and Free Soiler, friend to both Giddings, Lincoln’s old abolitionist boardinghouse mate, and Chase. The telegram was addressed to “Hon. A. Lincoln,” and it read: “will you speak in Mr Beechers church Broo[k]lyn on or about the twenty ninth (29) November on any subject you please pay two hundred (200) dollars.” Briggs represented an influential group of Republicans interested in the 1860 Republican presidential campaign. Beecher was, of course, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher of the most famous theological family in the country that also included his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. From the pulpit of Beecher’s Plymouth Church, renowned as the “Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad,” Beecher had thundered for resistance to slavery in Kansas.
Invitation to Lincoln to speak in New York
Lincoln “came rushing into the office one morning, with the letter from New York City,” recalled Herndon. “Billy, I am invited or solicited to deliver a lecture in New York. Should I go?” “I advised Mr. Lincoln I thought it would help open the way to the Presidency—thought I could see the meaning of the move by the New York men—thought it was a move against Seward—thought Greeley had something to do with it—think so yet—have no evidence. The result . . . was a profound one, as I think.” Lincoln accepted, but the date and the venue would change.
At 7:05 in the morning of October 17, a passenger train conductor of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad sent a telegram to the main office: “Express train bound east, under my charge, was stopped this morning at Harper’s Ferry by armed abolitionists. They have possession of the bridge and the arms and armory of the United States. . . . The leader of those men requested me to say to you that this is the last train that shall pass the bridge either East or West . . . you had better notify the Secretary of War at once.” By afternoon, President Buchanan ordered Marines under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee to the town.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THIS GUILTY LAND
In early May of 1858 a peculiar man knocked on the door of William Seward’s home in Washington. “He began with a story of great personal distress, involving himself and family, and stated that he had come to me on that account,” Seward recalled to the Senate Committee investigating John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry. “I supposed that the object of his visit was to solicit charity. I allowed him to go on with his story without interruption. I found it very incoherent, very erratic, and thought him a man of an unsound or very much disturbed mind.”
John Brown, 1859
Hugh Forbes, a Scotsman of about forty-five years old, who called himself a colonel, had been a silk merchant in the Tuscan city of Sienna, fought with Garibaldi in the failed Italian revolution of 1848, fled to Paris, married and fathered children, only to leave them behind when he sailed for New York, where he was editor of an Italian language newspaper, the European, from which he was fired, lived in an apartment on the Lower East Side on Delancey Street next to a brothel, advertised as a fencing coach, and worked as a translator for the New York Tribune. Through another Scot, James Redpath, a former reporter for the Tribune, he was introduced to John Brown, who was on a disappointing fundraising foray to Manhattan in March 1857. Redpath had attached himself to Brown as his chief publicist. Brown was fascinated with Forbes’s credentials as an exotic military expert in revolutionary warfare and hired him at $100 a month with a $600 advance. For the penniless soldier of fortune, Brown offered the promise of both soldiering and fortune. He saw stars and dollars in his eyes. He would be the “general in the revolution against slavery” and paid royally by the wealthy benefactors he learned were bankrolling Old Brown. His first call was on Horace Greeley, who forked over $700, and then visited the most munificent donor of them all, Gerrit Smith, whom he hit up for an additional $150, which the eternally credulous Smith wrote would “prove very useful in our sacred work in Kansas” and that “if Federal troops fight against” the cause “we must fight against them.” For months Forbes ignored Brown’s urgent plaints to come west and instead
dallied over his translation of a guide to guerrilla warfare entitled Manual of the Patriotic Volunteer. When he showed up at last at Brown’s miserable little camp at Tabor, Iowa, he discovered there was no army or armory, just Brown’s sad-sack son Owen, whom Brown assigned Forbes to drill in marching and target practice. Relative peace had broken out in Kansas as the political struggle over the Lecompton Constitution heated up. Forbes wrote a stilted two-page tract, “The Duty of the Soldier,” referring to ancient republics and appealing to U.S. soldiers to desert. Brown presented it to donors and requested $500 to $1,000. Some disapproved, but Gerrit Smith sent $25.
During the long boring days and nights in camp Brown confided to the untrustworthy Forbes his latest and most grandiose version of his Subterranean Pass Way. He intended to lead twenty-five or fifty men “to beat up a slave quarter in Virginia” and gathering two hundred or five hundred slaves who would “swarm” to him, of whom he would take “100 or so of them” to capture the Harpers Ferry federal armory, escaping with its weaponry into “three, four or five distinct parties,” to “beat up other slave quarters,” drawing more into his invincible army. Entrenched in the Allegheny Mountains after “liberating” Virginia he would advance through Tennessee and Alabama, and “his New England partisans would in the meantime call a Northern Convention, restore tranquility and overthrow the pro-slavery administration.”
Isolated and broke, with a bounty on his head for the Pottawatomie murders, Brown spun an ever more elaborate vision in which he saw himself as the general of a slave army, seizing one Southern state after another, and leading to the overthrow of the U.S. government by the Transcendentalists of Boston.
Forbes proposed an alternative to Brown’s fantastical scheme. Raiding parties operating on the Virginia and Maryland border would swoop down to free small groups of slaves “once or twice a month” and send them to Canada. Even a single failure would not “compromise” the whole enterprise. If it could sustain itself, Forbes wrote, “Slave property would thus become untenable near the frontier . . . and it might reasonably be expected that the excitement and irritation would impel the proslaveryites to commit some stupid blunders.” But Brown wasn’t interested in Forbes’s small-scale idea; nor could he continue to pay him. After only a month with Brown, Forbes told him he was returning to New York for a brief time on personal business. He had decided to expose Brown as a dangerous charlatan.
Forbes showed Seward his guerrilla warfare manual. He claimed he had been hired to help free state settlers defend themselves. He said he had “suggested the getting up of a stampede of slaves secretly on the borders of Kansas, in Missouri, which Brown disapproved,” and that “Brown did not pay him anything.” “He said Brown was a very bad man, and would not keep his word; was a reckless man, an unreliable man, a vicious man.” Seward sent him away, telling him that while he was “touched” by his story about his family’s privations, as a Senator he could not give him advice about Kansas.
Seward said Forbes gave no inkling of the attack on Harpers Ferry and that the meeting “passed out of my memory.” “All kinds of erratic and strange persons call on me with all manner of strange communications and applications.”
Soon after visiting Seward, Forbes went to the Senate chamber to find Senator Henry Wilson sitting at his desk on a Saturday. “I had never before heard of him,” recalled Wilson. Forbes explained that Brown had employed him to drill men “for the defense of Kansas,” had not paid him, and that Brown’s financial backers “were under obligations to pay him.” “He seemed to be in a towering passion, greatly excited . . . that Brown was not a fit man to have arms, that they ought to be got out of his hands.” Then he disappeared. When Wilson saw his friend Gamaliel Bailey, editor of The National Era, the next evening at his house Bailey asked him if he had seen Forbes. Bailey had spoken to him, too. He told Wilson that Brown’s backers in Massachusetts, whom Wilson well knew, “ought to get those arms out of Brown’s hands, and that I had better write to some of them to that effect.”
After Forbes defected, Brown attracted a nucleus of misfits to serve as his phalanx—a naive idealist who was also a killer, a petty thief, a former lover of Lord Byron’s widow, a mercenary, an attempted murderer who had lived among Indians, a crusading journalist, a lost teenager, and a fugitive slave. In December 1857, Brown instructed them that the departed Forbes would train them for their mission to liberate slaves, “a successful insurrection in the mountains.”
For a month, from January 28, 1858, through most of February, Brown felt safe, like a fugitive slave himself, in Frederick Douglass’s home in Rochester, where he composed a Provisional Constitution on behalf of “We, the citizens of the United States, and the oppressed people, who, by a recent decision of the Supreme Court, are declared to have no rights which the white man is bound to respect” that denounced slavery as “a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion” against the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. Brown’s constitution established a government for the land within the country he expected to occupy. In forty-nine articles he laid out three branches, stipulated every citizen must “labor in some way for the general good,” removal from office for “intoxication,” outlawed “swearing, filthy conversation,” provided for the sharing of “captured or confiscated property” including watches and jewelry for “the common benefit” or an “intelligence fund,” and that deserters would be “put to death.” Brown talked day and night about his constitution until “it began to be something of a bore to me,” Douglass confessed. “Once in a while, he would say he could, with a few resolute men, capture Harper’s Ferry,” Douglass wrote, but added, “I paid but little attention to such remarks.”
Brown wrote his Boston benefactors about “BY FAR the most important undertaking of my whole life,” and asked for money. On February 22, he divulged his “whole outline” to Gerrit Smith and Franklin Sanborn, the youthful director of the Massachusetts Kansas Aid Committee, at Smith’s house in Peterboro, New York, “to the astonishment and almost the dismay of those present,” recalled Sanborn. He and Smith suggested “difficulties; but nothing could shake the purpose of the old Puritan.” He told them, quoting the Book of Romans, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” And the money he requested, he pled, was only a “small sum.” Smith informed Sanborn, “You see how it is; our dear old friend has made up his mind to this course, and cannot be turned from it. We cannot give him up to die alone; we must support him.”
Sanborn raced to Boston to arrange meetings for Brown in his room at the American House hotel for the group that with Smith and Sanborn became known as the “Secret Six.” George L. Stearns, descended from an old Puritan family, was a wealthy manufacturer, married to the niece of the abolitionist writer Lydia Maria Child, and a chief funder of the Emigrant Aid Society. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Unitarian and Transcendentalist minister, disciple of Theodore Parker, married to the niece of William Ellery Channing, theological founder of Unitarianism and Moral Philosophy, had stormed the Boston courthouse where the fugitive slave Anthony Burns was imprisoned in 1854 in a vain effort to release him. Samuel Gridley Howe, physician and reformer, founder of the first school for the blind, had spent six years as a surgeon organizing relief efforts and fighting in the Greek War of Independence under the spell of Byron, whose verses he freely recited. He saw himself as a Byronic hero, a romantic breaking the bonds of oppression. He bought Byron’s self-designed plumed battle helmet at a Greek auction and hung it in the hallway of his Boston home. The King of Greece decorated him a Chevalier of the Order of St. Saviour. His friends and wife half-jokingly referred to him as “Chev.” Higginson called him “a natural crusader or paladin . . . in whom every call to duty took a chivalrous aspect.” He had like Higginson been a member of Parker’s Boston Vigilance Committee to shield runaways and been involved in shepherding slaves to Canada. And like Higginson he had gone to Kansas to witness the struggle firsthand. He gave Brown the gif
t of “a little walnut box with a fine Smith & Wesson revolver in it,” recalled Howe’s daughter.
And there was Parker himself, the moral center of the Transcendentalists, stricken with tuberculosis, who would leave the country in early 1859 in search of a cure he knew he would not find. From Rome, on November 24, 1859, after receiving word of Brown’s death sentence, Parker wrote, “wishing I was at home again to use what poor remnant of power is left to me in defence of the True and the Right.” Spitting up blood constantly from his diseased lungs, he wrote, “Slavery will not die a dry death.” He prophesied that “the negroes will take their defence into their own hands, especially if they can find white men to lead them.” Like almost all radical abolitionists except for a very few individuals, Parker believed in the natural inferiority of blacks. “No doubt the African race is greatly inferior to the Caucasian in general intellectual power, and also in that instinct for liberty which is so strong in the Teutonic family, and just now obvious in the Anglo-Saxons of Britain and America. . . . But there is a limit even to the negro’s forbearance.” He could not help but return to the trauma of Sumner’s caning and the revenge that would be visited upon the South. “One of the legitimate products of her ‘peculiar institution,’ they are familiar with violence, ready and able for murder. Public opinion sustains such men. Bully Brooks was but one of their representatives in Congress. . . . She cries . . . ‘Hurrah for Brooks!’ . . . The South must reap as she sows; where she scatters the wind, the whirlwind will come up. . . . The fire of vengeance may be waked up even in an African’s heart, especially when it is fanned by the wickedness of a white man: then it runs from man to man, from town to town. What shall put it out? The white man’s blood!”
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